Artist Profile: Peter Kalill exhibits in Eastham

It’s usually difficult to pinpoint the reason the work of an artist changes, but for Kalill, it was simple as a plane flying overhead.

“People say, ‘You paint plein air,’ I do not,” he says in his studio, which he built behind his North Eastham home. “I say I paint outside.”

It was while he was outside, painting an angular house in Wellfleet, that everything changed. A plane flew overhead, leaving behind contrails, lines that crossed the sky.

“There were a bunch of these going through the sky, and it looked funky and cool,” he says. He painted them into the skyline of the study. “And then I went back to the studio and ruined it by painting the way I always paint.”

He put that study aside, started anew, and came up with “Geometric Sky.” The purple, blue and white lines that crisscross the sky and each other affected the way Kalill painted the trees behind the house, which are “folded into themselves like origami umbrellas.”

The house is largely representational, because of its own exaggerated shapes. This new geometric style of work is bolder than Kalill’s representational paintings — they are more striking than typical landscapes.

“And then I just got interested in simply the shapes,” Kalill says.

Dream-like shapes invade an unfinished painting of a sailboat navigating the high sea. The wind turns the boat’s sails into sideways-hung hammocks (Kalill once traveled through Guatemala, sleeping in huts on hammocks).

The tips of ocean waves appear as snow-covered mountaintops (Kalill skied extensively as a kid). “Everything in that painting is what it should be, and something other,” he says.

Though he lives in Eastham, he often paints further out on the Cape, and is a member of The Beachcombers, an artists-only club that was started in the early 1900s by renowned painters Charles Hawthorne and Edwin Dickinson, among others.

Kalill’s paintings reflect that era, and more recent times that, he says, see artists and fishermen disappearing from the area. In his painting, “The Last Doryman,” Kalill captures Provincetown’s own Eddie Ritter, who died in March 2017, in oil from a photo that he took of the fisherman on his famous orange dory in Provincetown Harbor.

“He’s an icon,” Kalill says. “That was his last Blessing of the Fleet. I loved [the photograph] and always wanted to paint it. And with him going away, that’s the last of it. He was the last doryman. I feel like there’s much more of a story to tell in the slow and old pace of life around here. It’s definitely going away.”

Kalill says he worries that the vacant houses on the Outer Cape, used two weeks a year by second-homeowners, don’t allow artists or fishermen to move here to paint or catch only what they need for dinner anymore.

“Now everything’s about wealth, fame and celebrity,” Kalill says.

But what he can’t change, he can paint. He can paint how things were, in a way that shows others to see. And he does.